SQLiteKV: An efficient LSM-tree-based SQLite-like database engine for mobile devices

SQLite has been deployed in millions of mobile devices from web to smartphone applications on various mobile operating systems. However, SQLite is not efficient with low transactions per second. In this paper, we for the first time propose a new SQLite-like database engine, called SQLiteKV, which adopts the LSM-tree-based data structure but retains the SQLite operation interfaces. With its SQLite interface, SQLiteKV can be utilized by existing applications without any modification, while providing high performance with its LSM-tree-based data structure. In SQLiteKV, we develop a light-weight SQLite to key-value compiler to solve the semantic mismatch, so SQL statements can be efficiently translated into KV operations. We also design a novel coordination caching mechanism so query results can be effectively cached inside SQLiteKV by alleviating the discrepancy of data management between front-end SQLite statements and back-end key-value data organization. We have implemented and deployed SQLiteKV on a Google Nexus 6P smartphone. Experiments results show that SQLiteKV outperforms SQLite up to 6 times.